This digital collage is an imagined ritual of return, created without AI or stock imagery, drawn from personal archives, experiences, photographs, and items I’ve gathered with care. Every element is placed with intention, intuition, and the tactile memory of hand-cut collage, a medium I often explored in my younger years, and a medium I return to every now and then when so much in the world feels outside of our control. This work emerged from a sense of fragmentation of body, land and identity. The pause before placement, the act of removing, replacing, erasing and bringing back. When overwhelm takes over, collage-making can cultivate some semblance of agency. In “When the Land Dreams Her Back” I gather symbols + scenes from multiple homelands, binding together converging geographies into one scene. I place myself at the center, adorned with traditional, Balochi embroidery, lift my arms toward the sky, my fingers tightly wrapped around a Sindhi Ajrak, beneath a flock of circling birds captured from my mother’s bedroom window in Karachi. The back of my head is replaced with a reflective mirrored motif from the Persian + Turkic inspired Shah Jahan Masjid in Thatta. The sand below my feet, the water ahead and the sky above unite Sindh with Balochistan. I am faceless, but not erased, ancestor, self, and future all at once. Carpet, camels, horse, reptiles, taveez, each element bears witness and carries a memory. Black leather amulets, firmly stitched with prayers, knotted with string, worn against the skin, blown upon by Ammi’s breath, offering timeless protection, until death makes her claim. I used to scoff and roll my eyes at the mysticism practiced in my family. Now, as I make every effort to decolonize my mind, when I look at these amulets tied to my neck, my wrist, my waist, I realize these are ancestral love languages, coded with protection and longing. They’re thinking of us, even when resting beyond the realms of reality, waiting patiently for our eternal reunion.